The phenomenon of solarization, long regarded as a technical failure of the photographic process, was used as a plastic control, particularly by Man Ray. With gross over-exposure, or with an after-exposure of the naked film to light the sensitive material begins to bleach, until at length not a negative, but a
 |
| moholy-nagy: From the Radio Tower, Berlin, 1928. The Museum of Modern Art |
 |
| edgerton: Swirls and eddies of a tennis stroke, 1939. Courtesy Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Cambridge, Mass. |
positive image is formed. The change is gradual, and begins at edges. Prints made from negatives in which this edge-reversal has taken place show, therefore, the contours rimmed with black lines.
Man Ray also made negative prints, processed both normally and with edgereversal. He diffused the image by deliberately increasing the size of the silver grains. These controls are adaptations of the photographic process. Other physical methods of distorting the camera's natural image have been devised. Texture is introduced in the gelatin emulsion of the negative by subjecting it to rapid temperature changes, producing reticulation, or a net-like struc-
EDGERTON: Splash of a drop of milk falling into a saucer of milk. 1936. Courtesy Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Cambridge. Mass.
 | u.s. army air force: Water-filled volcano crater from 15,000 feet above Onnekotan Island in the Kuriles |
 |
| u.s. army air force: Mud flats al low tide near St. Brieuc, France |
ture in the normally transparent film. Or the gelatin is melted, so that the image it bears droops and sags. A pseudo bas-relief appears when a negative and transparent positive are printed together slightly out of register. These methods have all been used singly or in combination by experimentalists who are impatient with the camera's normal image.
The vision which led to these applications of the photographic technique is quite separate from the vision of those who seek to interpret with the camera the world of nature and of man. Viewing these photograms and solarized prints and distorted negatives, we are constantly reminded, not of photographs, but of paintings. Indeed Lottis Aragon has said, "one completely unfamiliar with the painters alluded to would not be able to appraise fully the results." James
D. H. rowland: Etched surface of tin, magnified 18 1/2 diameters. Carnegie-Illinois Steel Corporation, Pittsburgh
 |
| A. VON HIPPEL & F. H. MERRILL: Lichtenberg figure, macle directly on photographic film by an electric discharge in nitrogen gas under high pressure. Courtesy Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Cambridge, Mass. |
Thrall Soby — the critic, historian and collector of modern painting — pointed out in U. S. Camera Magazine, 1940, that in his experience abstract photographs did not wear well when hung as pictures.
The non-objective photographs — the rayographs, the odd angle shots, the composite prints — have one by one been taken front their frames and filed away against the clay when they may have some minor value as commentary on the aspirations of certain artists in the 1920’s.
In addition to making photograms and in working out carious highly ingenious changes on the photographic technique, Laszlo Moholy-Nagy was deeply interested in all kinds of photographs. He always considered photog-
 |
| radio corporation of America laboratories: Zinc oxide smoke, magnified 31,488 times with an electron microscope |
J. m. eder & e. valenta: X-ray transparency. 1896. Eastman Historical Photographic Collection, Rochester, N.Y.
raphy as a means rather than an end, a tool for seeing. He was contemptuous of technique, and was content to send his films to the nearest photo-finisher, for he was not so much concerned with their intrinsic beauty, but in their revelation of form and structure. Like Coburn, he discovered abstract beauty in the very distortions which beginners had traditionally been warned against. He found the negative itself a thing for contemplation. He discovered beauty after the photograph had been taken, and it did not matter to him who made the photograph or why it had been made. Once, looking at a photograph which he had taken years previously from a bridge tower at Marseilles, his attention was held as if it were a new thing and the work of another. "What a wonderful form!" he said, pointing to a coiled-up rope. "I never saw it before!” It was this attitude of approaching photographs in the quest of form that led him to appreciate scientific photographs for their quite often accidental beauty. In them he found the new vision of the world.
Certain it is that the scientists by means of photography have made visible the unseen, laid bare the structure of the microcosmos, and penetrated the worlds which lie beyond seeing. While the scientific significance of these photographs may escape us as laymen, our imagination is gripped by their strange and often provocative beauty.
Already in 1839 Fox Talbot had showed the value of his process to record the image of the microscope:
The objects which the microscope unfolds to our view, curious and wonderful as they are, are often singularly complicated. The eye, indeed, may comprehend the tvhole which is presented to it in the field of view, but the powers of the pencil fail to express these minutiae of nature in their innumerable details.
His experiments were limited to low magnifications, but he clearly foresaw the time tvhen the microscope would become a camera, its image thrown upon sensitive film. The form of the microcosmos has been laid open to all, permanently and beautifully. Complex crystalline structures which defy description are precisely recorded, and we can enjoy the beauty of their forms. With the electron microscope magnifications of unheard-of potver are regularly attained: so evanescent a substance as smoke is seen to be an architecture of bold geometry.
The photographic emulsion reacts to rays which are invisible. In 1895 Wilhelm Conrad Roentgen discovered X-rays, and the world was startled to see photographs of living skeletons. The truth of the first radiographs was doubted: a photograph of the bones of the hand with one finger encircled by a ring was said to be considerably retouched if not actually a drawing. While the technique was still a novelty, readily verifiable and easily identified objects were X-rayed for the wonder of it. and many of these still lifes of a phantom necklace inside a locked jewel box, with every screw delineated through the wood, possess a strange and quite accidental beauty. Although the greatest use of X-ray photography is in medicine, industry finds it of value in the examination of cast parts for flaws and invisible imperfections.
The modern astronomer no longer watches the heavens, but studies a photographic plate. The telescope has become a camera, fitted with precision mechanism to guide it so that the images of moving heavenly bodies will remain immovable upon the photographic plate for hours. During these long-exposures light so weak that it cannot be seen by the eye accumulates a silver deposit on the sensitive emulsion. Harlow Shapley, Director of the Harvard Observatory, has noted that
 |
| Ml. WILSON OBSERVATORY: Orion, nebula south of Zeta Orionis. containing Dark Bay, exposure 3 hours. November 13, 1920. The Museum of Modern Art |
On one plate in the Harvard collection of stellar photographs more than a thousand external galaxies have been discovered, measured, and catalogued: each is probably a richer stellar system encompassing more space than that occupied by all the naked-eye stars . . . Whether galaxies or planets, stars or meteors, they all yield up their secrets through the agency of the photographic plate.